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Archives for July 2008

Let me start off buy saying that RIMarkable isn’t a financial blog and we don’t offer financial advice. That being said, however, I couldn’t agree more with Mad Money’s Jim Cramer when he says now is the time to buy stock in Research in Motion (RIMM).

This biggest thing to happen to RIM over the last year has been the release of the iPhone and I believe that the iPhone 3G will do as much if not more for BlackBerry sales simply because RIM has several next-generation devices coming out starting with the BlackBerry Bold in the next month or so.

RIM’s stock (RIMM) has gone up every time a new BlackBerry has come out and all indicators point in the direction of that trend continuing once RIM’s second half line-up of new devices start hitting the street.

In an interesting if not odd move, Nokia has asked all of their Nokia Eseries customers using BlackBerry Connect to move fully over to the BlackBerry and to stop buying devices from Nokia.

I guess that this isn’t exactly what Nokia said, but, they did stop supporting BlackBerry Connect and even said that RIM is now a competitor.

RIM are a competitor and have done a reasonable job in a space that is traditionally ours, so it’s no great surprise that we see this as an opportunity to give consumers a proper choice on what email solution they want.

Now, I know that Nokia is a giant handset manufacturer, especially outside of the United States, however, this move all but ensures that they will never again sell a device to a business user in the U.S. that works for a company that has standardized on BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Word on the street is that the Verizon BlackBerry Thunder will launch on October 8th. I am still not completely sold on a BlackBerry with only a touch screen, however, I am so getting one of these when they come out.

I have to say that I am fairly skeptical about the BlackBerry Thunder launching in less than two and a half months. Granted the BlackBerry Bold has been delayed a couple of times however, we’ve seen a lot of press about it and the Bold is prominent on the BlackBerry website. You don’t have to look too hard to find celebrities or even AT&T employees that already have the Bold.

I don’t believe that the BlackBerry Thunder, on the other hand, has even been officially announced. We don’t even know if the device will indeed be called the BlackBerry Thunder. I would be willing to bet that if October 8th is the date that the Thunder will launch we will starting seeing some big announcements coming out of Waterloo in the not too distant future…

Just the other day we saw a news article about how Australia based mobile telecom Telstra will offer the BlackBerry Bold for free. Now Telstra has a press release that, not only, tells you that they will offer the Bold for 0$, but, that the device will be available before the end of next month.

Telstra will be offering the new BlackBerry Bold smartphone for $0 upfront to business customers from the 25th August 2008 and customers can register their interest from today via our website or by calling 1800BUSINESS.

Alameda County, California Superior Court Judge Bonnie Sabraw has ordered Sprint to pay $54.7 million in fees back to customers who were charged erroneous early termination fees but didn’t pay them and $18.2 in cash to those customers that actually paid the bogus charges. This lawsuit is so popular you can catch a whole page in the www.yellowpages.com about it.

It is probably safe to call the $73 million that Sprint was ordered a drop in the bucket if the ruling stands. Sprint has two weeks to respond to the judgement. What may be worse for Sprint than the $73 million is the rejection of Sprint’s argument that federal law pre-empts California law which means that more states may come after Sprint individually as compared to one big federal case which may come as well.

So, I was talking with an IT Guy who just finished up a project where he was looking to see if the iPhone was a viable alternative to using the BlackBerry at his company. Like many companies, he said that there are a ton of non-BlackBerry using folks that want to be able to get their email via the iPhone.

IT Guy said that he picked up on iPhone 3G the Sunday after they launched and knew before the following Monday morning that he wouldn’t be able to do anything more than allow web access to email as far are corporate applications go. IT guy said that he wouldn’t even be able to set up the email push which is now native to the iPhone.

IT Guy’s biggest concern… Security. His exact words were, “Apple knows everyone would be hacking these things and it seems like they didn’t even try when it comes to security”.

IT Guy said that he bought his iPhone 3G on Sunday morning and had the thing “jail broken” by Sunday night. Jail Breaking is the basically hacking your iPhone to allow it to do things that it wasn’t intended to do.

IT Guy asked me if I had ever heard of a jail broken BlackBerry. I said “no”, then he said “That’s why Apple won’t be moving in on their turf in the enterprise anytime soon.

Believe it or not, IT Guy said that he is going to hang on to his liberated iPhone 3G because it is cool to hack around with. He won’t be letting it anywhere near his corporate network though.

Verizon Wireless still isn’t the nation’s largest Wireless provider. The number one spot still belongs to AT&T. Verizon did, however, make the most money in Q2 posting the industries highest Q2 revenue numbers coming in at $12.1 billion. This is roughly $85 million more than AT&T made.

Verizon also dropped its industry leading churn rate down to 1.12% down from 1.3% last year. I am going to go out on a limb and say that churn will rise modestly in Q3 as AT&T just released the iPhone 3G at a very attractive price point.

This is two quarters in a row that Verizon has made more money than AT&T so apparently, being the biggest doesn’t necessarily mean that you are the best.

What is the best way to compete with a $199 iPhone 3G? Completely subsidize the price of your device with a qualifying data plan. This is exactly what Australia based Telstra is doing with the BlackBerry Bold.

Telstra will offer the BlackBerry Bold for 0$ with a qualifying plan to business customers sometime in late September. Complete details aren’t yet available, however, a Telstra spokesperson said that data and pricing plans will be revealed in a few days.

Rumors about a burnt orange BlackBerry Curve from T-Mobile called the BlackBerry Curve Sunset have been floating around for some time now. It was initially believed that the BlackBerry Curve Sunset was supposed to be released today, July 28th, however, some conflicting reports have the device coming out in a week on August 4th.

I’ve heard that some T-Mobile store employees have stated that they have the BlackBerry Curve Sunset is in stock in the stores but I have to wonder why the device wouldn’t be available at the start of business is it is indeed going to be available for sale today.